Subject: Re: [pkix] Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP)

From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:35:40 +0000

I've spent the time since the last exchange of messages on this thread talking
to various SCEP users over their requirements.  It turns out that the figure
I'd previously posted, of half a billion SCEP devices in active use, was
rather an underestimate.  SCEP seems to be pretty much the universal device-
provisioning protocol for non-PC/laptop devices, including mobile phones,
SCADA devices, gaming machines, ATMs, firewalls, and so on.  It's also been
described to me as the standard BYOD provisioning protocol, its use for this
being so widespread that Server 2012 even added new, extra capabilities for
dealing with BYOD use via SCEP (Windows Server 2008 and 2012 are pretty much
the standard server implementations for dealing with this sort of thing).  As
one person told me, "if a device speaks anything, it'll speak SCEP".

So, no matter how much Cisco would like to forget about it, it's extremely
widely used, and there's no sign that this is going to change in the future.
To paraphrase something someone said many years ago about IBM, "SCEP isn't the
competition, it's the environment".

To that end I'd like to request that the SCEP authors give me (or someone else
who cares about it, e.g. one of the JSCEP folks) change control over the
document so that we can finally get this published.  I submitted a list of
changes for the current doc ages ago but things seem to have stalled since
then (the changes were minor things that have come up in real-world usage,
clarifications to the doc, places where ~15-year-old remnants still exist next
to current ones, and just a general cleanup of the neglect that it's had for
the last decade or so, it still talks about MD5 and single DES for example,
but doesn't mention that newfangled AES thing that everyone's talking about).

Given that it's been more or less abandoned by Cisco, I'd like to finish the
editing for it and finally get it published as an RFC so that the vast number
of devices out there using it, and that will use it in the future, have a
fixed standard that they can refer back to.

Peter.

---

From: Anders Rundgren <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 17:19:26 +0100

The only thing that could eventually replace SCEP for "devices" including
BYOD, would be a protocol that builds on embedded attestation keys like the
FIDO/Google U2F scheme.  Such a scheme could completely eliminate the
reliance on enrollment passwords.

For browsers-based enrollment none of the PKIX-protocols make any sense since
the former effectively is server-driven.  I.e. it is the server that asks the
client (platform) to generate a key-pair according to the server's specification.

Related: http://www.w3.org/2012/webcrypto/webcrypto-next-workshop/

-Anders

On 2014-10-29 14:35, Peter Gutmann wrote:
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